Saturday was a bad night for the Washington Capitals. In their first game since May, the Caps got topped 6-3 by the Tampa Bay Lightning after a pitiful third period. One Cap, though, had to wait an even longer time between games. For the first time in over two years, Tom Poti stepped on the ice in an NHL game. After suffering a nagging groin injury and a busted pelvis (and before that almost losing an eye) it’s been a slog for Poti to make it back to the NHL. But just 8:25 into the game Poti got back into the action, assisting on Joel Ward’s game-tying tally. It was the 35-year-old defenseman’s first point since December 21, 2010 when he tallied an assist against New Jersey.

Welcome back, everybody! After 250+ days, we’ve finally got new Capitals hockey to watch and kinda enjoy. I say kinda because these Capitals, whom those not dissuaded by cliché might call the new-look Caps, didn’t have their act together on Saturday. Opening the season in Tampa, the Capitals had troubles with even-strength offense and all kinds of special-teams stuff.

Eric Brewer scored the first anti-Caps goal of the year with an outside shot that caught Holtby screened by his own defenders. Joel Ward tied it up with a first-period powerplay goal assisted by Tom “Iron Groin” Poti. That tie was shortlived, as Vincent Lecavalier exploited a defensive breakdown by Holtby & co. to score an easy one.

Joel Ward recorded a second goal to tie the game early in the second period, but Martin St. Louis restored the Tampa lead with a powerplay sweep-in a few minutes later. Wojtek Wolski ingratiated himself to Caps fans with a crucial four-on-four goal late in the second, knocking a rebound past Anders Lindbäck.

Martin St. Louis got his second of the night, a heartbreaking shot from outside during a third-period 5 on 3. Cory Conacher scored the first goal of his career, also the night’s proverbial dagger, on a 3-on-1 breakaway. Ryan Malone scored on the powerplay to make it painfully obvious that the Caps were gonna lose.

At the KHL All-Star Game in Cheylabinsk last week, Tomas Kmec of allhockey.ru spoke to Washington Capitals prospect Evgeny Kuznetsov. In the interview Kuznetsov, who is under contract with Traktor Cheylabinsk through 2013-14, revealed for the first time that he plans to play in Washington after his contract ends.

“I promised to play for Washington after the Olympics,” Kuznetsov said, as translated by RMNB’s Fedor Fedin. “I want to play in [DC], but I’m playing for Traktor right now. I have a contract and I will continue to fight with sweat and blood playing for such a great club.”

When asked why he chose to stay in Russia during the summer, either because of the Olympics or money, Kuznetsov gave a very short answer. “I knew there was going to be an NHL lockout,” Kuzya replied. “That’s it.”

If you recall, last September Alex Ovechkin turned 27 years old, and — in a tradition as old as time– our readers made birthday cards for the Russian machine. Among them was one submission that was particularly special to me. Abbie, an adorable little girl, sang “Happy Birthday” for Ovi and then punctuated it by scoring a goal. There’s a few things special going on here: 1) Abbie knows the players by name at her age; 2) Abbie loves the Capitals; and 3) Abbie plays hockey, a sport not so popular with younger girls. As a fogie 28-year-old, I want to encourage more of this. So I contacted the family, and I bought a shirt for Abbie to show my appreciation.

On Saturday, Abbie’s dad Chris sent me a picture of Abbie (in her new Holtbeast t-shirt) and her twin brother Aidan. Adorable and ferocious. Beat the Bolts indeed.

No more waiting. Hockey is here. Are you ready? Perhaps not. It’s been like 252 days since the last Caps game. To help acclimatize you, we’ve polled the RMNB crew and asked them what they expect from the upcoming season. Behold: our predictions for the 2012-2013 NHL season.

Effective immediately, all original content on RussianMachineNeverBreaks.com and its related sites is covered by the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This means you can share, copy, and remix anything we create — so long as it’s done with attribution and not for commerce. This license applies to our writing, our illustrations, our videos, and photos by our team. It’s a lot of content (2000+ posts), so go crazy.

Happy hockey day. Peeking at RMNB today, you might notice we’ve made some changes. The new RMNB has a new main navigation along with a new design. It’s a little more toned down than the old design– with less Ovi and more focus on the things that you actually do on our site. See all our social stuff along the top, there? Ain’t it spiffy?

If you can’t see it or if it looks a little weird, clear your cache. You can hit CTRL + F5 if you’re on a PC. If you’ve got a Mac, just throw it in the trash and get a new one. You can probably afford it.

This is just the first step in a series of site improvements that we’ve been planning for a while. We’ll be doing a full redesign sometime in the near future. For now, we’ve got a bunch of new pages on the site, which you can check out by clicking around that pretty top nav. We’ve also put all our original content under a Creative Commons license, which you can read about later. When we started RMNB a few years ago, we didn’t expect anything like this level of success. We’re gonna keep working to make RMNB a rewarding experience for you guys.